Windows Builds

All of our Windows builds are packaged as 7-Zip Self-Extracting
Archives in .exe format. You download the archive and double-click on
it and save the extracted files to a directory on your hard disk. To
run Firefox, you can double-click on the executable from Windows
Explorer or create a shortcut to the executable and drag it to the
desktop or add it to your Start Menu.

We don't provide Installer Builds as many people that use Unofficial
Builds like to test new versions or keep multiple versions of Firefox
on their systems and only one version of Firefox can be installed on a
system (to the best of our knowledge).

In general, it is a good idea to backup your Firefox profiles before
testing a new version of Firefox or Thunderbird as new versions of the
software, especially pre-release versions, can damage existing profiles
to the point that older software versions can't use the profiles after
they have been modified by newer versions.

In general, you can get information on how the builds are done from the
kits themselves. To get information on Firefox builds related to the
build configuration, you can type about:buildconfig in the URL bar and
hit return. Build configuration information from the .mozconfig file
will be displayed on the screen. When code optimizations are used,
there will usually be a directory named source in the kit that contains
the patches or source code of the changed files that are required by
Mozilla's licensese. If a kit doesn't contain the source code, contact
us and we'll do our best to provide you with the code changes used for
that kit.

Win32 builds that start with K8 will generally run on Pentium 4s,
Pentium Ms, Pentium 4Ms, Xeons, Athlon X2s, Opteron and Athlon 64 chips
and generally any CPU that supports the SSE2 SIMD extensions. I will
start doing builds that will run on Pentium 2s and Pentium 3s along
with older AMD chips in the near future (Dec 21, 2005 so you can bug me
if I take too long). Builds that start with P3 will be for CPUs that
support at least the SSE instruction set and builds that start with P2
will support CPUs that support at least the MMX instruction set. And
builds that start with P1 will support Pentium 1s and on up.

In general, I'm building with VS2005 which seems to have problems
running on Windows 2003 SP1. So for now, I'm also doing VS2003 builds
for certain versions of my builds. In general, the VS2003 builds are
from X40 and below or X50 and above and have even numbers.

Some of the 32-bit builds made under VS2005 don't run under Windows 64
and maybe it's for the same reason that they don't run under Windows
2003 SP1. The X43a build does run under Windows 64 and I'll have to do
some digging to see why the others don't right now.

Windows 64-bit Builds - Also Known as x64

At the time of this writing (November 2005), Mozilla.org does not
provide native 64-bit builds for the Microsoft Windows using the x86-64
architecture. To our knowledge, Makoto Kato is the only other person
that does x86-64 builds for Mozilla.org products. His website is
available at Mozilla
for Windows x64 platform
and his site provides Trunk builds, the Build tools for x64, patches
that need to be applied to get the builds to work and directions for
building native 64-bit builds. Makoto provided me with a lot of help to
me to get my builds going.

We will generally provide milestone and release builds towards the
Version 1.5 release. At the moment, Firefox is at 1.5 Release Candidate
3 and Thunderbird is at 1.5 Release Candidate 1.

The current released version for Firefox and Thunderbird is 1.0.7 and
it is unlikely that these could be built for Windows in a 64-bit native
version given the pretty large divergence in the code line between
1.0.7 and the 1.5 Branch and we don't plan on backporting Makoto's
changes back into 1.0.7 so the first release version for native 64-bit
Windows will likely be Version 1.5.

There are some caveats towards using the native 64-bit builds and that
is plugin support. As of this writing (November 2005), Sun Microsystems
has not commited to releasing a 64-bit plugin for Mozilla for Java yet
so Java will not run in the browser even though there is a 64-bit
version of Java available. In addition, Macromedia does not have 64-bit
plugins available for Flash and Shockwave so those aren't available as
well.

We keep 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the browser around so that I can
run the other browser if I need those plugins. In general, we prefer to
run the 64-bit version of the browser.

We provide the required source code change information in the source
directory in the kits. These change presume that you have Makoto's
changes already applied and you can find his changes at his website
which is linked above.

One note for Thunderbird users with dual-core or hyperthreading
systems. Some users have run into hanging problems with Thunderbird x64
on dual-core systems and have found a workaround in setting the
processor affinity for the Thunderbird process. In general, this is a
pain in the neck to do as you have to do it every time. But there is a
better solution that you can read about in mozillaZine.

Note: a Trunk Win64 build from Makoto Kato (20060214) can be found at
http://www.mozilla-x86-64.com/download.html
I generally prefer release builds as they are far more stable but some
people like to play with the latest and greatest.

Thunderbird Builds

A note from a user on MozillaZine when using dual-core systems:

im not sure if its your place
or you care about doing it, but i've been
using your K8T-X54 thunderbird build on my AMD 64 4400+ X2 machine, and
it continuously times out whenever i try and get mail. i did a
bit of
looking around, and found that installing some drivers for the Athlon
64 X2 Dual Core Processor seemed to fix this problem straight
away.
you can find the drivers here:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html